Tablet VII

Summary

Enkidu awakens from a chilling nightmare. In the dream,
the gods were angry with him and Gilgamesh and met to decide their
fate. Great Anu, Ishtar’s father and the god of the firmament, decreed that
they must punish someone for killing Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven
and for felling the tallest cedar tree. Only one of the companions,
however, must die. Enlil, Humbaba’s master and the god of earth,
wind, and air, said that Enkidu should be the one to die. Shamash,
the sun god, defended Enkidu. He said that Enkidu and Gilgamesh
were only doing what he told them to do when they went to the Cedar
Forest. Enlil became angry that Shamash took their side and accused
Shamash of being their comrade, not a god.

The dream proves true when Enkidu falls ill. Overcome
with self-pity, he curses the cedar gate that he and Gilgamesh brought
back from the forbidden forest. He says he would have chopped the
gate to pieces if he’d known his fate, and that he’d rather be forgotten forever
than doomed to die like this. Gilgamesh is distraught. He tells
Enkidu that he has gone before the gods himself to plead his case,
but that Enlil was adamant. Gilgamesh promises his friend that he
will build him an even greater monument than the cedar gate. He
will erect an enormous statue of Enkidu, made entirely of gold.

Enkidu cries out to Shamash. He curses the hunter who
first spotted him at the watering hole and says he hopes his hunting
pits are filled in and his traps are unset. Weeping, he curses the
temple prostitute too, who seduced him away from the animals. Shamash answers
him from afar. He asks why Enkidu curses the harlot, since if it
hadn’t been for her, Enkidu would have never tasted the rich foods
of the palace, never worn beautiful clothes, and never known Gilgamesh’s
friendship. Shamash tells Enkidu that when he dies, Gilgamesh
will wander the earth, undone by grief. Enkidu finds comfort in
Shamash’s words. He retracts his curse and supersedes it with a blessing
for the prostitute: May her patrons be generous and rich.

The next morning, lying in his sickbed, Enkidu tells Gilgamesh about
another terrible dream. In the dream, he was all alone on a dark
plain, and a man with a lion’s head and an eagle’s talons seized him.
They fought furiously, but the man overpowered him and changed him
into a birdlike creature. Then he dragged him down to the underworld.
There he saw kings, gods, and priests, all of them dressed in feathers.
He saw King Etana, whom Ishtar had once chosen to be King of Kish,
and Samuqan, the god of cattle. All of them were living in darkness.
Dirt was their food and drink. Queen Ereshkigal, the ruler of the
underworld, sat on her throne, and Belit-Seri, the scribe of the
gods, whose tablet tells everyone’s fate, knelt before her. Enkidu
says the queen looked at them and asked who led them there. Enkidu
tells the appalled Gilgamesh that he would have been blessed if
he’d died in battle, because those who die in battle are “glorious.”
He suffers for twelve more days then dies.

Analysis

The first half of Sin-Leqi-Unninni’s version of The
Epic of Gilgamesh revels in the friends’ raw physicality
as they sate themselves with pleasure and test themselves with heroic
tasks. In this pivotal tablet, the exact halfway point of the epic,
they must struggle against that same physicality. No matter how
strong, bold, or beautiful they are, a place awaits them in the
underworld.

The adolescent exuberance and celebration of Tablet VI
comes to an abrupt halt as the two heroes face the stark horror
of an agonizing, wasting death, unredeemed by battlefield heroics.
The gods have spoken, and their verdict seems arbitrary: Enkidu
must die. In a later tablet, Gilgamesh learns that the gods once
set out to eliminate all life on Earth for no discernable reason
at all. Enkidu curses the hunter and the prostitute, who connived
together to lure him from the wilderness. He believes that if he
had stayed with the animals and continued to live like an animal,
he wouldn’t have brought doom upon himself. Without self-knowledge,
he wouldn’t be able to feel the exquisite anguish that the prospect
of dying is causing him. Enlil accused Shamash of acting more like
a human being than a deity, and the comfort the sun god offers Enkidu
is indeed humanistic. The god tells him that love, glory, and the
pleasures of a cultivated life are important, as are being loved
while alive and mourned when dead. This consolation offers a strange
kind of comfort, since he is essentially saying that the recompense
for losing the life he cherished is the life he cherished.